


Abracadabra

by Lyricality



Category: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - All Media Types
Genre: First Kiss, First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-18
Updated: 2005-01-19
Packaged: 2017-11-11 13:04:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/478824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyricality/pseuds/Lyricality
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eight years after that fateful day in February, Charlie has finally learned how to want. Wanting isn’t the same as knowing how to take, however. Based heavily on the look of the future Burton film and the chronology of both Dahl’s books. Depp is Wonka.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally begun for the livejournal whangdoodles community in December 2004, finished in January 2005. Written before Burton's film actually premiered.

_“Give a man everything he desires and yet at this very moment he will feel that everything is not everything.”  
\--Immanuel Kant_

A clap, muffled thinly by leather, and Charlie knows what’s coming next. He slits open both eyes, staring up and up and up, where the ceiling is shaded in sugar, blue and violet and white dusting together in a familiar pattern of duplicated sky. It’s still almost the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

“I have a thought!”

_Knew it._ Charlie rolls onto his side, flattening the swudge a bit beneath him, but it always springs right back, which probably has something to do with the way the Oompa-Loompas obsess over it, spinning blade upon blade of wavy thin grass and clipping each bit back into shape with the tiniest of pruning shears. Charlie loves to watch them, hypnotic in their precisely graceful energy, going about their business whatever it may be; he tried to help them at first, when he was still new to the factory and didn’t understand how delicate one had to be, to avoid disturbing this world. They’d laughed at him then, his hands already too big, trying to work alongside them and lagging behind instead, turning out jagged edges of sugary grass.

“Is it about going back to the Alps?” Charlie asks. “That Swiss cartogeographer sent another message yesterday. I left it on your desk.”

Wonka is perched beside him--not on the ground, but on a rock crafted entirely of sugar quartz, its faces transparent, faceted, glowing, and against that gleaming concoction the man is a study in rich darkness. His lean legs are crossed at the knee, his form invitingly angular, and he’s sipping something green and smoking out of a china teacup. It’s picturesque.

“No no,” he says, waving a careless hand. “Well, yes and no, but no. And yes.”

Charlie waits. The way Wonka’s mind works, it gets both behind and ahead of itself. Usually at the same time. Better to wait until it sorts itself out.

“I was thinking that--don’t you think we could cut the fudge carving time in half if we stopped the Oompa-Loompas dragging it about and imported Snorklebeasts from the Alps instead? It’s quick already, yes, but the Oompa-Loompas do so complain about the aching of their backs afterward...”

Rolling all the way over, Charlie lets his weight rest on his stomach, bracing himself on his elbows and picking a buttercup, eating it petal by petal. _Loves me. Loves me not._ “I thought you didn’t get on with Snorklebeasts,” he says, voice mild.

“Well no,” Wonka concedes, “but you do. And think, just think of the headache we could save the Oompa-Loompas. They do so hate heights.”

Charlie feels obligated to point out the fact. “We’re underground. Isn’t height necessarily negative?” Still, it’s an idea with a lot of outward merit, and some buried part of him wails at not thinking of it first. He’s no magnetic genius like Wonka--he’d had to accept that long ago, that some things can’t be taught, no matter how willing you are to work or to learn--but he does have flashes now and then of brilliance. At those times, he loves to see the true smile hidden beneath the readily polite version on Willy Wonka’s lips.

“Nonsense,” Wonka maintains. “Below ground, height must strain itself to become even more positive, to counteract the gravity of the earth. Everyone knows that.” He sips from his teacup, then licks foam from his upper lip with a flash of pink tongue.

Charlie pauses, distracted enough to remember something, a little snippet of conversation. They had been in the Alps all right, with snow gusting around them in deeper and softer piles than even Wonka Brand cotton candy, and Wonka’s darkly striped scarf had been wrapped round Charlie’s neck, because he’d forgotten to pack his own. The knitted yarn had smelled irresistably like cinnamon melted in chocolate, like home. He’d been fifteen years old and gangly, and Wonka had been wearing his dark glasses to protect his eyes, waving his arms wildly to describe _something,_ and Charlie had realized that for the first time, he and the other man were of a height, and Wonka had said... “Wait a minute. Isn’t eighty percent of the world’s population allergic to Snorklebeasts?” Charlie says.

Wonka’s eyes widen, going round. “Gracious me, but you’re right! How could I have forgotten that, I wonder?”

“How indeed, I wonder,” Charlie says, a little dry, because he recognizes that crafty spark in those blue eyes well enough. It’s just another test, then. At least they are becoming less frequent, these days, but they never entirely disappear. He picks another buttercup. _Loves me not._ He really should remember to start with the opposite phrase next time. Or how about something different? _He trusts me. He trusts me not. He trusts me._ Flowers aren’t supposed to lie.

Wonka takes a last sip from his teacup, then takes a bite out of the rim, leaving a neatly scalloped hole. “Thank goodness you remembered. What a waste all that inedible fudge would have been, don’t you think?” He rises nimbly to his feet, unfolding.

“I do think,” Charlie sighs, and looks up at Wonka’s back with baleful eyes. They’ve passed the point long ago where Wonka could call him clever, and Charlie could be satisfied with just that.

Wonka inclines his head a bit, acknowledging, but even when he turns back to face Charlie, the brim of his hat hides his eyes. When he isn’t quite smiling, and his lips have just that slightest of curves, his skin is flawless, pale and smooth like crème de menthe. The possible eternity of youth surrounding him still strikes Charlie, sometimes. More often than he might like. Wonka seemed thirty, perhaps as much as thirty-five, that long day long ago when first they met, and after eight years he seems forty at the most, still fabulously quirky and inexhaustibly eager. “I know you do.” He lifts his head, and his eyes sparkle from under the delicate fringe of his eyelashes. “I do, you know.”

It’s a grudging thing, because he meant to stay a little annoyed, but Charlie smiles anyway. “Better do what you know, then.”

“I know what I do best,” Wonka returns, and Charlie thinks they’ve taken that quite as far as they ought to, and perhaps a step further.

Wonka turns again, and clearly he means to go, and that’s enough to make Charlie sit up fully, leaning back with both hands braced behind him. The swudge is springy between his fingers, too exuberant for real grass. “Where are you going?”

Flipping his pocket watch quite out of nowhere, Wonka flicks it open one-handed and effortless, showing Charlie the face. Charlie knows it anywhere--the hands still point obediently, but all the numbers have fallen in a clutter at the bottom of the glass, wearing themselves weak trying to keep up with Wonka’s pace. “It’s four o’clock,” Wonka says. “Almost quite precisely.”

“Almost quite,” Charlie repeats with a very narrow grin. He loses track of time in the Chocolate Room, because everything here is warm and wonderful and hazy and smells completely of chocolate, and because Wonka usually comes here with him. Now and then, Charlie likes to drift deep into himself and dream in silence, forgetting deadlocks and deadlines and anything else that ruins his creative process. Wonka is careful with time, in contrast. He never loses it, never wastes it, and most certainly never kills it. He likes to dream out loud.

Charlie doesn’t mind it anymore. Besides, he’s always liked listening to Willy Wonka speak...even when some of it really is perfect nonsense. But that’s the way the man’s mind works--getting the nonsense out of the way right off and turning the rest to genius. Sometimes turning the nonsense to genius, too.

Their creative personalities do differ in a number of little ways. That took some getting used to, at first, and they’d had their first real arguments over how and when and where and why and who was better off not disturbing whom at which time. Charlie learned within the first year that Wonka’s intensity isn’t all laughter and light; the man is a ruthless perfectionist by necessity, and has the unexpectedly moody streak that all geniuses seem to share. Once when Charlie was all of thirteen, and Grandpa Joe was so recently deceased, he had disturbed Wonka in the Inventing Room, demanding the man’s attention with a sort of testing desperation until Wonka had cut him down with a few sparse words and shut the door in his face. Wonka had been exceedingly sorry afterwards--Charlie could tell by the greater consideration the man gave him for months after that horrible evening--but the incident had been quite the effective reminder, nevertheless.

Wonka is not his father, is not his brother, and in a disturbing way, is not quite his friend. They are close, as close as Wonka will apparently allow, but for years now they’ve been sliding into a pattern of student and mentor, separated by a strange professionalism that doesn’t really suit either one of them. It’s unpleasant. It’s awkward. It makes the Oompa-Loompas unhappy.

Charlie misses being allowed to fling his arms around Willy Wonka’s slim waist.

“Good luck,” Charlie says only, and it isn’t enough, even if Wonka doesn’t need it in the first place.

Wonka smiles, and it’s the real thing. Not the one of pure honesty he reserves for children and doubting adults, but the slow and secretive one he uses when something truly pleases him. Charlie’s heart rises somewhere into his throat and starts to ache.

“Of course, thank you, of course,” Wonka says, returning the watch to one of his pockets. He comes up with something else in one gloved hand, something that sparkles, and when he tosses it, Charlie catches it reflexively, cupping it in his fingers.

It’s an Everlasting Gobstopper, a small emerald sphere. Charlie turns it like a crystal ball, manipulating it with deft twists of his fingers, rolling it back and forth over the back and palm of one hand, then sitting up a bit straighter and switching it from hand to hand, always flowing. It’s the sort of trick a magician might use on a street corner. Wonka can only do a facsimile of it with both hands and his cane, but Charlie can manage the genuine article. After years of working side-by-side among the graceful Oompa-Loompas, he is very good with his hands.

“Excellent!” Wonka cries, and claps both hands together, muffled applause, his cane resting in the crook of one arm. Charlie manages not to simply glow with praise, however fleeting. “Your luck is always the best, isn’t it? I’ll put it to good use.”

Charlie arches both eyebrows, tilting his head. “Promise?” He used to ask that too often, when he was still very young, but Wonka never really seemed to mind. “Promise.”

Resting a hand over his heart, the man goes nearly solemn for a moment. “Cross my heart,” he says, and does it with one gloved finger. “I promise.”

Good enough. Charlie sprawls backwards against the confectionery hillside again, still playing back and forth with the Gobstopper for a moment. “I believe you,” he says, then pops it into his mouth. Pity they always stay the same flavor, really. That’s something to work on in the future. At the same moment, he sees Wonka’s eyes widen a little, lips parting as if to protest, and a disconnected part of his mind realizes that this Everlasting Gobstopper must have actually been his--as in, Wonka had been sucking on it.

Well, if he wants it back, he’ll have to ask. Nicely.

He doesn’t, and a minute later he goes, stepping light and sure back out of the Chocolate Room and toward the Inventing Room. Wonka is a bit of a creature of habit, after all. Charlie curls his tongue around the Gobstopper and wonders if it all means anything, or if he just likes the idea of holding something in his mouth that Wonka might have touched with his tongue, and with his lips. It’s still substitution, but Charlie is good at that sort of culinary math. Ninety-two percent fantasy, seven percent lonely patience, four percent pure sugary lust, and two percent Wonka’s perfect gleaming lips. One hundred and five percent decadent misery.

Charlie knows the reason for his unhappiness well enough. Before the first news of the Golden Tickets, he had known better than to want. He had conserved his strength for more important things than desire, more desperate to survive than to dream, and though his imagination had always been an active thing, it had been of necessity banked much of the time by exhaustion or worse. By age ten, he had already forced himself to forget how to want more, because the not-getting of it hurt just a little too much.

But then came Wonka.

With the first notion, the first idea of a Golden Ticket, Charlie had experienced a pang of want so sharp, so consuming, that he’d actually felt a twinge of guilt once he was holding the last ticket in his hands, as if wanting so much had somehow been cheating. He still believes that the power of that desire had been greater than any good fortune, and that his desperation, with nothing left to lose, had somehow brought the ticket straight into his hands. Even now, eight years older, he considers his childhood self to have had the ultimate advantageous disadvantage.

Having a great many of your wishes suddenly granted is a marvelous thing. It’s also a little terrifying.

Knowing what you want is usually enough to make you want what you can never have.

Charlie closes his eyes, blotting out the warm delicacy of the manufactured world around him, and he indulges himself. He yearns. He pines. He even _angsts,_ just a bit, because though Wonka is generous beyond belief, and gives everything he has and everything he can possibly create, he never surrenders anything of himself.

A little tap on his shoulder rouses him again after a minute or two, and he opens his eyes to see one of the Oompa-Loompas hovering over him, her eyes wide and bright. She barely has to lean down to whisper into his ear.

He tilts his head and listens. “The boiler room? The main or one of the auxiliaries? Oh. I see. Butterscotch Ripple or Marshmallow Cream? Well, that’s different.” The Oompa-Loompa nods, and he pushes himself up to his feet, leaving an imprint in the swudge that quickly disappears. “Let’s go.” Some problems really are literally too big for the Oompa-Loompas to handle alone.

Some time later, squished between a sheet of metal and the back wall of one of the factory's hundred-thousand rooms, he begins to think that some jobs are too big even for regular humans, and that asking the impossible isn’t really fair, even in Willy Wonka’s domain. He has the Oompa-Loompas for company at least, and they are brilliantly helpful, even if they rarely initiate conversations and never question him...even when he’s about to do something very stupid, such as open the inner barrel of a boiler without remembering to drain the thing first. They do sing about the event afterwards, of course, but that’s always a little anticlimactic. Besides, being splashed with marshmallow cream isn’t the worst fate he can imagine.

“Hand me the other one, please,” he says to the nearest Oompa-Loompa from his position wedged halfway under the boiler, holding a screw in place with one hand and reaching out the other for the screwdriver. “The new one.”

A hand appears, but instead of small and pale, it’s long-fingered and gloved in black. It _is_ holding the right wrench at least, a long strange one with a handle turned to a ninety-degree angle, so Charlie gives a mental shrug and takes it. “What on earth is that? Or off earth,” Wonka says, leaning over the edge of the boiler to eye the wrench, “not to restrict you in any way of course.” He looks distressingly tidy, from Charlie’s point of view. Altogether unnaturally smooth, the ironed creases still crisp in his clothing.

Charlie holds up the wrench. “I made it. It’s for screwing around. Around corners, that is.” He grins, a little naughty, and ducks beneath the boiler again.

“No, no no,” Wonka exclaims, catching and tugging at Charlie’s sleeve. “Come out of there, out of there right now, and taste this.”

Wonka’s getting marshmallow cream all over his gloves, so Charlie relents, obediently opening his mouth. He’s learned not to question, any longer, whether something Wonka gives him might be safe or not. The man might be exuberant, but he isn’t entirely careless. Most of their accidents have been, fairly enough, impossible to prevent--like the time Charlie had to be packed off to the hospital after a nasty allergic reaction to Wonka’s Marvelous Metallic Fudge. They only manufacture hypoallergenic sterling silver fudge now, as a result.

Whatever Wonka gives him is a bright and very deep green, and tastes of mint and maybe sugared cream. “It’s good,” he offers.

Wonka claps his hands together and spins around neatly on both feet, his smile dazzling. “Isn’t it? It is! Do you like it, then?”

“Yes,” Charlie reassures him, ready to go back under the boiler again. “What is it?”

Wonka clasps both hands together atop his cane, lips curved in his best and most eagerly secretive smile. “You will never, never guess. You will never be able to guess what I made it from. From what I made it. You know the grammar.” He waves a hand.

“Well, it tastes of mint...” Not that _that_ necessarily means anything, considering Wonka’s talents with flavors.

“Broccoli!” Clearly, the man’s enthusiasm far outpaces his patience with any guessing games at the moment.

Charlie sits up fast enough to smack his head against the bottom edge of the boiler; it makes a perfect ringing C note, and sends his vision spinning for a moment or two. “You made that out of broccoli? As in the vegetable? Bane of children everywhere?”

Wonka looks ready to be offended, or at least a little put off. “You don’t like the idea?”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to believe you,” Charlie corrects. “It’s fabulous.” He grins. “You’re fabulous.” It’s just slipped out, but since it’s the truth, who cares. Wonka certainly looks startled, eyes gone appealingly wide, but he doesn’t say anything. Returning briefly under the boiler, Charlie tightens the last of the screws, then works his way out again and rises to his feet. “There. Another minor catastrophe averted.” The Oompa-Loompas seem more than willing to tidy up the rest of the mess.

“Mostly averted.” Wonka has a strange, high flush in his cheeks that Charlie has seen only once or twice before; good gracious, but he’s blushing. He’s laughing too, eyes a brighter blue than any sky Charlie remembers. “You do have marshmallow cream in your hair. And everywhere. Pity about that shirt.”

“It’ll all come out in the wash,” says Charlie without a thought, and only a moment afterward does he realize that he’s come out with one of Wonka’s own favorite sayings. They share a briefly awkward look, then laugh together. At least he hasn’t really ruined anything, since the shirt and most of the rest of his clothing is already white. He and Wonka don’t quite share the same taste in fashion, but the sewing prowess of the Oompa-Loompas has proven more than equal to the task of pleasing them both in very different ways. Charlie prefers his clothing high-collared, almost Mandarin, with far looser sleeves than Wonka’s frockcoats would allow. He likes having his arms free.

He likes being free to move, to create...to touch.

Then he’s shocked, when Wonka lifts one gloved hand and runs two fingertips down his cheek. Charlie can count on one hand the times the man has touched him intimately, and yet now Wonka is setting those fingertips to his lips, licking off marshmallow cream. If Wonka’s eyes weren’t closed, Charlie thinks--hopes--that he could see something new reflected back at him in blue. As it is, he’s most certainly gaping.

Wonka licks his fingertips again. “Augustus-flavored-chocolate-covered-Gloop would have ruined me,” he says, his head tilted just low enough that Charlie still can’t see his eyes. “Packaging you coated in marshmallow might make me a fortune. Much pleasanter taste, don’t you think?” His voice is utterly innocent, tone perfectly mild.

And if a proper response to that even exists, Charlie doesn’t know it, and besides, his brain is reeling at the moment. Not just with the image, a curl of pink tongue against dark fabric, but with the sudden warm influx of _possibility_ as well, pressing inward against his chest until he wants to gasp for breath. Cheeks still dimly flushed, Wonka has already turned, already slipped away and out of Charlie’s grasp, but maybe where and when and how he goes no longer matter so much, or mean the same thing.

Charlie knows how to want him, after all. He knows where to find him. Most importantly of all...he might even know, now, how to take him.


	2. Chapter 2

_"The same hammer that shatters the glass forges the steel.”  
\--Russian proverb_  


When Charlie leaves the factory, he usually goes alone. Sometimes--often, at first, but rarely now--Wonka comes with him, but for ages after the Incident with the Great Glass Elevator they were hailed as heroes wherever they went, and the attention wore on Wonka’s passionate sense of privacy as it dragged on and on. Photographers snapped pictures of them in the streets and in the parks. Reporters followed them about at not-quite a distance and narrated their most mundane activities with the sort of breathless excitement usually reserved for natural disasters and American football games.

Charlie had been immediately overwhelmed. Naturally so, given his previous inauspicious position in life. Once just after his eighth birthday, he’d been out of school for two weeks with a bad cold and the teacher had never noticed, calling attendance and handing out assignments to Charlie’s desk as if shy silence were only the usual response. Charlie had received one hundred and fifteen percent on an exam he hadn’t even sat for, sometime during the second week. That score really should have given them a clue. He hadn’t been much of an overachiever in school.

The sudden attention still feels surreal. He still expects the world to tire of them, just pick up the newspaper one morning and exclaim, “Ugh, how weary I am of this Willy Wonka nonsense!” and that will be the end of it, and they’ll have some peace at last outside the factory.

He knows it’s not to be. Whether through some uncalculated element of human curiosity, or through the man’s own charming insistence on secrecy, Willy Wonka fascinates the world.

Maybe the universe as a whole. Charlie tends to believe that the vermicious knids remember Wonka very, very well.

The obsession is probably inescapable. Charlie knows it so personally, understands it inside and out, fits not-quite into it like an outgrown glove. Two weeks have passed since Wonka touched him, tasted him if only by proxy, and the sensation of it stays, imprinted into his skin. He wants that mark of possession, but he hasn’t yet decided how to ask for it.

Wonka wants to remain undisturbed. So he stays largely concealed in the comfortable reality of his voluminous imagination--his illuminous imagination--and usually Charlie does as well. Wonka’s imagination is a highly familiar place to him, after all, safer than anyone who knows the man only casually might assume, and Charlie vastly prefers the monsters there to the monsters lurking outside the factory’s walls.

Sometimes he does wonder just where he really exists, and if he’s more real outside or within, as if Wonka had dreamed him aloud in twists of vanilla and milk chocolate.

He hasn’t melted yet, wandering outside into the sunlight, but one day he might.

Today he’s wrapped in peppermint-white wool against the heavy chill in the air, and the sunshine’s bright enough that he’s wearing his sunglasses as well. They’re just half-circles, nothing so charmingly eccentric as Wonka’s own shaded goggles, but Charlie is more accustomed to natural light. Besides, out of Wonka’s shadow, he isn’t so keen on drawing attention to himself. His own fame is tangential to Wonka’s genius, just a satellite circling in a wider orbit.

When he slips out of the gate and latches it behind him, three--no, four--children appear from seemingly nowhere, swirled right up out of the lingering patches of snow and wrapped in tasseled yarn and warm woolen mittens. Charlie knows them intimately without recalling the name of even one. The group changes from week to week, month to month, and sometimes year to year, now, but they seem drawn to him as they are to Wonka, and Charlie doesn’t mind. No, not in the slightest. He gives them as much candy as he remembers to bring--and hopes desperately that they all brush their teeth regularly afterward--and so long as they don’t squabble or behave themselves badly, he’ll juggle for them or do more complicated magician’s tricks, things that need only sleight of hand and a little willing belief on the part of the audience.

Sometimes they mistake him for Wonka, from the newspaper and television pictures they’ve seen. They do look a little alike, with the same dark hair and startling blue eyes, even if Charlie’s hair is longer, and his eyes more gray than sapphire. He doesn’t sparkle, but sometimes he glows.

Eventually he runs out of time--another careless crime that Wonka would never allow of himself--and leaves them behind, walking his way through the streets of the town, gone unfamiliar in a thousand indefinable little ways. Maybe he should worry more, that he’s becoming a stranger to the world in which he was born.

Maybe he shouldn’t worry at all. This world never showed him much kindness.

The cemetery isn’t far, but the temperature is dropping, so his steps move briskly along the pavement, crunching in the patches of ice. Around his neck is wrapped Wonka’s familiar dark scarf, ends fluttering out over his chest in the breeze; Charlie steals it whenever Wonka obviously won’t need it, or won’t notice its absence. It smells of peppermint cocoa and pumpkin seeds. It’s an added blanket of security. He should carry it like a standard, bear it like a flag, but he would rather just wrap it over his nose and mouth and breathe it in, breathe back into it.

Just beyond the cemetery gate, the pavement dribbles off into gravel, then into grass. The graves here and there are marked with flowers and wreaths, some splashed red with poinsettia plants in honor of the quickly approaching Christmas holiday. One headstone is draped in sharp leaves of holly.

The five headstones he goes for directly stand apart from the rest, simple and pale and unadorned, and Charlie comes to a halt between them all, facing the nearest two, the brittle layer of frost crackling beneath his feet. He rests one hand upon the right headstone, one hand upon the left, and kneels between them, closing his eyes. He’s almost grown big enough now, almost big enough to wrap both arms around everything he loves and hold it together, envelop it in a full and protective embrace. But he’s too late for that. This is the most he can do, kneeling on the graves of Grandpa George and Grandma Georgina and Grandma Josephine, arms outstretched to the graves of his mother and his father.

The Buckets had never had the money to buy a plot in the cemetery. Wonka had seen to that, with more subtle reserve than he usually cared to show, paying the amount without so much as a word, and dodging the questions of repayment that Charlie determinedly asked. Charlie had been fourteen years old when his mother died. His father had gone the year before. They had both been weak after years of hardship, and Charlie had learned for the first time that some illnesses couldn’t be cured, not even by the great Willy Wonka. Not by Vita-Wonk, or Wonka-Vite. Until her own dying day, Grandmother Georgina never forgave Wonka for that helplessness--for the cruelty of fate that forced her to witness her own daughter’s death. Charlie doubts that Wonka has ever forgiven himself, either.

Grandpa Joe isn’t buried here.

“I’m happy,” he tells them all, after perhaps twenty minutes of silence, as it’s the only proper thing to say. “I’m happy, so it’s all right.”

Sprawling yourself over graves and talking to headstones isn’t exactly regular behavior, so he’s attracting unwanted attention again, largely just from other mourners…for now. He’s also cold and stiff and his coat is freezing to the earth beneath him. He feels a little stronger, but a little sadder, too, so it’s time to go.

On the way back, he evades two photographers by ducking into a side alley and doubling back, his shoes leaving slightly pointed prints in the freezing slush of Sunday afternoon until he’s back on the main roads again. At the stand on the corner before the factory, he stops to buy a newspaper…and a pack of Slugworth’s Double Coconut Gum, because he loves it dearly and Slugworth’s patents keep Wonka from developing anything reasonably similar.

It’s only the slightest of betrayals, but Charlie feels it particularly keenly today. At just this moment, Wonka seems both closer to and farther from him than ever before, as if some greater balance is teetering, ready to fall. It feels inevitable, and it scares him a bit, so he just unwraps a piece from the silver pack and chews it as he walks back through the gate and latches it behind him, heading across the grounds to one of the nondescript doors. He’s never been _just_ a good boy, after all.

Night falls quickly here in December, and the dimming light of late afternoon stretches the shadows across the paved path as the door swings open for him, shutting behind him just as neatly and latching with an audible click. The lock shuts the other world out, and Charlie is home.

The Oompa-Loompas take back Wonka’s scarf and Charlie’s coat, even though they have to stand on each other’s shoulders to manage it; no amount of protesting will dissuade them from their assumed duty, so Charlie merely suffers being outwardly disrobed and otherwise manhandled, bundled into a quilt and given a cup of his favorite cocoa. Well, perhaps being well taken care of isn’t such a trial, after all. The Oompa-Loompas do seem to enjoy helping so much. For Wonka’s sake, he can understand it, since the man still holds his lauded position as their savior; for his own sake, he doesn’t understand their eagerness in the slightest. Probably more of Wonka’s transferred fame.

He thanks them, then listens carefully as one describes the current state of the factory, daily disasters and all. Sundays are holidays for the factory employees, but he and Wonka never entirely stop working. Neither of them is particularly religious. Besides, Charlie still enjoys the challenge of this great and sprawling place, which sometimes purrs and sometimes groans and occasionally wakes him in the middle of the night with a loud complaint.

Once they’ve taken care of a clog in one of the dyeing pools far below ground and a leak in a secondary heating pipe just above the Chocolate Room, Charlie’s watch reads nearly seven o’clock. He and Wonka don’t usually meet for supper on Sundays, but maybe he ought to break tradition tonight. Without Wonka nearby, the factory can seem a very large and lonely place, especially on Sunday evenings after a visit to his family...such as it is. Wonka isn’t in the office they share, however, and he doesn’t answer Charlie’s knock on the door to his private rooms. If he’s still ensconced in the Inventing Room, Charlie isn’t _about_ to disturb him, either.

Well, if he has to be alone, he has a preferred place for it.

The factory does still have rooms upon rooms aboveground. They don’t follow the twisting paths of the tunnels below, constructed instead on square corners and right angles with human workers in mind. Many stand empty and echoing, still warmed by rising heat from the millions of pipes below ground, but otherwise uninhabited and useless to the current running of the business. Charlie still finds one or two useful in different ways, however, because some of the tower rooms have windows to see the sky. The tallest structure of the factory spirals up from the center point and stretches out into a sloping dome, but the point at the very top is a full semisphere of clean glass, faceted into a hundred separate hexagonal planes. Charlie likes to wander up there at night to see the stars, and sometimes the moon, if it’s risen after dark. He needs a proper setting for solitude now and then.

When he steps out of the Great Glass Elevator tonight, however, Wonka is already standing at the farthest edge of the polished floor, head tipped upward. He’s awash in starlight. Each velvet stripe of his coat is fuzzy with silver, and Charlie stands back against the wall, ever polite, unwilling to disturb. High above in the sky, the dog star is gleaming, winking like the myriad sparkles of Wonka’s eyes. Everything is frosted blue and white.

He turns at last, and Charlie catches his breath, because the faint curve of Wonka’s lips is stunning in half shadow.

“Come here,” he says, and holds out a hand, as if Charlie has gone little again, a child needing encouragement. “You have to make a wish.”

Charlie comes, easily drawn, and he takes Wonka’s hand in his own. Not quite skin to skin with the barrier of gloves, but it’s close. He knows just what to wish, and standing with Wonka’s fingers knitted with his own, the air smelling of orange peel and nutmeg, he thinks it might come true.

Turning his head, he looks at Wonka with open eyes. “What did you wish for?”

Wonka squeezes his hand. “For less,” he whispers, in his secret voice, because he’s sharing something true, and Charlie stops breathing, listening hard. He wants to hear beyond the words. “Less people who want and want and want even though they _have._ Less selfish and horrible and greedy little children in the world.” Charlie nods. It’s a good Christmas wish. Turning, Wonka keeps Charlie’s hand in his, tightly grasped, like children combining their courage into one powerful force, and their eyes meet and hold. “What did you wish for?”

Charlie lets himself draw in a breath, but holds it. When he lets it out again, something goes with it--something small and scared and ashamed. “I wished for _more,”_ he whispers.

Wonka is an exceptionally clever man, but he doesn’t seem to understand at first “More? Of what?” His eyes shine guileless but passionate, an impossible combination, but nothing is impossible.

Maybe he’s being coy. He has that half-smile sometimes when he’s gleefully befuddling Charlie, too.

It doesn’t matter; it’s now or never anyway. Charlie senses a strange vibration in his skin, eagerness curling in his fingertips. In his lips. “More of you.”

Something shifts behind Wonka’s eyes, and they go a little shuttered, reflecting more starlight than they absorb. Charlie’s witnessed the expression a few times before, and his internal translator of Wonka’s moods reads it as something like, _Oh, well, but this subject makes me rather uncomfortable, and I’d really rather not discuss it at the moment when I have invoices to take and outvoices to send and isn’t there something that needs my attention in the Inventing Room and oh my goodness but I think I left the iron running!_

If he lets Wonka go now, he’ll never get an answer.

“You see me every day,” Wonka says. A curious smile curves the edges of his lips, half eagerness and half sorrow. “Aren’t you weary of me yet? I know I am--half of the time, I mean. The other half I find myself very pleasant company.”

Charlie watches him, the way he shines in the dark. “I know.”

“You do?” Arching both eyebrows, Wonka pulls back a bit, as if to regard him from a clarifying distance, but Charlie keeps their hands linked together, and Wonka can’t move more than a step. “You would,” he says at length. “Wouldn’t you? No one else could know.” He reaches out his free hand, and for a bare and quivering moment, Charlie thinks he’s going to touch him truly, rest fingertips against his cheek. Instead, the hand sidles to the left, and curves over his shoulder. “You would know me best. Wouldn’t you.”

Charlie shakes his head. “No,” he whispers.

Wonka’s lips curve a bit more, his eyes empty of humor, filled with starlight. Extraordinary. “No,” he agrees. “No one would, could they?”

“I want to.” They stand very close, near enough that Charlie can feel the narrow aura of warmth radiating from Wonka’s frame. He seems so delicate, to burn so bright. So close, but untouchable at the core, just their fingertips held together in connection, and Charlie doesn’t think he can stand it anymore, this continual almost-caress of Wonka’s personality, his creativity, his essence against Charlie’s own. It’s more seductive than any physical touch. “That’s...it’s all I want.”

“Charlie,” Wonka begins, and then he tilts his head just _so,_ and strands of his hair ghost over his cheek, his skin, his lips, his entire being ethereal in the gleaming darkness, and Charlie leans forward and doesn’t let him finish.

He’s never kissed anyone before. It’s a bit more physically and less emotionally complicated than he’s expected, trying to master the turn of his head, the almost alarming pressure of lips against his own, while simultaneously trying to feel, and remember. He doubts it’s entirely a success. Wonka’s lips are cool, and not just from the chill of the room; he feels like marble, or maybe like purest candy alabaster, sweet and smooth but unresponsive. Bitterly, disappointingly inhuman, and some deep part of Charlie’s heart quails, wondering just how mistaken he’s been, and how much of Wonka he really understands.

Then the lips against his part, a subtle softening, and Charlie knows for an intimate, unreal moment what a kiss can truly be.

It isn’t wet, but it’s _hot._ Melting, sizzling, like burning sugar running down his throat, pooling velvet in his stomach, and he presses helplessly into it, wanting more and more and _more._ A moment ago, they were hardly touching, but now they press lightly together, the outer angles of their bodies brushing, clinging, and the hand on Charlie’s shoulder splays suddenly just below his ear, into his hair. He’s too awkward and shaking and he doesn’t know what to do with his own hands, and for the first time he wonders whether or not he can really handle this, literally and figuratively, Willy Wonka near enough to hold in his arms... Kissing him. Maybe everything’s all right, because in another moment he expects Wonka to take control of this, to guide him in this as he has in everything else.

He doesn’t.

Without guidance, without focus, the kiss disintegrates like a crumbling structure, too hastily constructed, and they fumble apart, hands unclasping. Charlie would press forward, but his body founders, resists, and Wonka is already retreating. He’s standing back, wary, and he has his fingertips pressed to his lips, eyes wide, as if he’s just tasted something dangerous.

Charlie reaches for him, and he shakes his head. “No. I won’t.”

That distinctly shattering feeling in Charlie’s chest would make him crumple and fall, if he let it. “Why?” he whispers, biting for a moment into his lower lip. “Can’t you at least tell me why?” He’s halfway hard and his body feels dry and empty as kindling, ready to blaze.

Wonka shakes his head again, a small and childish movement. His eyes are so wide, dark and dilated, and for the barest instant, the barriers are slipping, and Charlie glimpses more than fear behind them. It’s a sort of shocking terror, clinging and self-protective and stubbornly resistant to desire. It’s almost more than Charlie can understand. He dimly concludes that this is the greatest difference between their natures.

Then it melts, or evaporates, that emotional doorway between them closing again. Wonka adopts a painful twist of a smile.

“I really must--I really must go.”

“Don’t,” Charlie whispers, and reaches again, but Wonka dodges around him, slips out of his grasp, slick as melting moonlight. “Wait. You’re all I have.” He can’t help striking out; this rejection hurts so badly. “You’re all I have left.” His family is gone, but Wonka is here and always here, and _his._ “You’re all I want, listen to me!”

Wonka is already stepping into the Great Glass Elevator. Its panes reflect the two of them, dark and bright, near and far. Too far. Wonka tilts his head so that Charlie can’t see his face or whatever incriminating emotion is visible there. “I really must go,” he repeats, one hand lifting to his cheek. The doors slide closed and the Elevator whisks him away...but not before Charlie glimpses him pressing his fingertips--his bare fingertips, he’s taken off a glove--to his lips.

Charlie wraps his arms around himself and tries not to feel so small, or so helpless, or so... _wanting,_ body aching like it’s empty at the core.

No, no, _no._ He doesn’t want to be a child needing someone to take him by the hand, or an adolescent lusting after an idol, fantasizing all over his sheets in the safety of his solitary bed. This isn’t who he wants to be. Not at all.


	3. Chapter 3

_“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”  
\--Mae West_

“That’s how it is. How it’s gone, I mean,” Charlie says. His voice reflects, echoes against metal and marble, and returns to him sounding tinny and false. “So. How do I fix it? Or do I fix it,” he amends, drawing his knees up against his chest and wrapping one arm around them. No, he’s never given up that easily, and he’s faced plenty of obstacles during the relatively brief run of his life. “Of course I fix it,” he whispers, leaning back, resting the curve of his spine a bit more securely against the headstone behind him. “I just don’t know how I’m going to manage it. Just yet.” He tilts his head back, resting it against chill stone as well, eyes closing. “Don’t suppose you have any helpful ideas?”

No answer, of course. Somewhere in the distance, he can hear the steadying hum of machinery, a constant among the factory’s many variables, and the muffled sound only intensifies the quiet of this room.

Grandpa Joe can’t answer anymore, anyway.

Of Charlie’s family, only Grandpa Joe might have considered taking Wonka-Vite, even after the fiasco with the other three grandparents. He’d so loved the world, as eager to explore it in his old age as in his youth, fascinated with progress and change and invention, gleeful to have a chance to participate in all three. He might have bought a bit more time, but he’d died peacefully in his sleep one night. One hundred years of life, gone in only a moment, and Charlie still misses him badly enough that his throat aches, sitting here like this, against his grave.

Charlie talks anyway; talking eases the pain. Only Grandpa Joe hears the truth, not just the endless repetition and reassurance that he tells the rest of the family, month after month. _I’m happy._ He’s happy, yes, but he’s human too, and sometimes he hurts.

Just now, pain is another constant in his personal equations. He and Wonka haven’t quite spoken in days, and avoiding each other is proving a little too easy in the sprawling and endless passages of the factory. Their world, always shared, now halved in a thousand crossing and bristling lines. Charlie’s life feels wound full of wire, taped together, just sort of shattering, but he won’t give up. He’s holding to one image now--Wonka’s bare fingers pressed to his perfect lips. Wonka kissed and kissed back. That’s hope.

This place is a sort of reprieve. Sanctuary, and that is the word spelled out in curving golden letters on the only door to the wide, low room. Not religious, but spiritual, and familial, this is the final resting place of a great many members of Wonka’s family, here in a room with a floor of earth and true, sprouting grass. Around Charlie, the headstones rise in a quiet series of curves, broken here and there by vaguely swirling spires of marble, columns supporting the vaulted ceiling. The entire structure speaks of reverence and whimsy, the sort of neverland Wonka would build for spirits beyond taste, past sound and light. Before his death, Grandpa Joe had declared that nothing would take him from the factory, and Charlie has chosen to interpret the wish as literally as possible. The factory is built around this place, the fantasy structure supported by this heart of silent reflection, and so long as Grandpa Joe is buried here, the factory holds his spirit of wonder.

“I love him,” Charlie whispers, and the words echo, reflected stone by stone. It isn’t the first revelation he’s made to this grave--in fact, it’s probably the most often repeated one--but it’s no less true for that. He made his first stumbling confessions of his heart’s desire here, beginning years ago.

A surreptitious creaking breaks the silence, and Charlie jerks, straightening up and looking toward the door, throat tightening. He’s hoping for Wonka, but an Oompa-Loompa enters instead--or half-enters, hovering in the doorway, looking not a little horrified at disturbing him. He doesn’t mind, and waves a hand, beckoning. Thus encouraged, she comes directly, soft steps barely disturbing the grass, and stands beside him with her hands clasped behind her back, her eyes wide and sparkling. The Oompa-Loompas hate the strife between him and Wonka--they’ve been moping for days--but this one is smiling, bouncing on the balls of her feet, so whatever she has to tell him must be wonderful.

Charlie tilts his head, and she leans over and whispers in his ear.

He knows his eyes must have gone nearly alight, because she’s barely holding back from giggling. “Really? It’s just started?” She shakes her head. “How much, then?” After she whispers again, he pushes himself to his feet, smoothing out the hollow in the grass where he’s been sitting. “I’ll come back soon,” he promises Grandpa Joe, resting both hands on the headstone for a moment or two, then pulling back and smiling at the Oompa-Loompa. “Let’s hurry, then,” he says.

The Sanctuary is just below ground level, and when Charlie closes the door behind him and ascends a half-flight of curving stairs, he can see through the ornate windows of the main level and out into the inner courtyard. The earth outside is buried in at least three inches of pure and perfect snow.

Wonka loves the snow. Maybe, if Charlie asks in just the right way...

It’s worth a try. Once he’s wrapped up in his coat and gloves, bundled into boots and--for once--his own scarf, he knocks at the door of their shared office. All in white, he feels a little like a sacrificial virgin. Hopefully Wonka will accept the offering.

“Come in!” Wonka’s voice is clipped, polite, but a little strained. He knows who’s at the door.

Charlie turns the knob and enters anyway, his current choice in clothing making Wonka’s eyes widen a bit, but he supposes that he does look ready for an immediate trip to the Yukon. He stays silent for a moment, merely smiling as he stands in front of Wonka’s desk, then makes a flourish with one hand and performs a bit of sleight of hand, pulling Wonka’s scarf apparently out of nowhere and holding it out to him in both hands.

“It’s snowing. Come outside and play with me.”

Wonka leans forward just a fraction, an aborted movement, and Charlie sees the subtle movement of his throat as he swallows. “Oh...oh. I really shouldn’t, I’ve so much time and so little paperwork, balancing the books for the end of the year. Hmm. Strike that.”

“Reverse it,” Charlie supplies. He gives Wonka the full benefit of his most charmingly pleading smile. “Please. Come with me.”

Wonka wants to go. He’s tapping his pen against the surface of his desk, and Charlie can hear his feet shuffling back and forth under his chair. Tilting his head, Charlie waves the scarf a bit between his hands, enticing.

“I’ll do the accounting,” he adds, just another little layer of temptation. “You hate it.”

For a moment, Charlie truly thinks that Wonka will agree, and his heart beats a little faster, his cheeks warming with the rush of his pulse and the eagerness glinting in Wonka’s eyes. Then Wonka draws a breath, and his gaze falls just for a moment on Charlie’s lips. In the next moment he grips his pen a little tighter and straightens his shoulders, swallowing again as though something has caught in his throat. “I’m sorry, I am, but truly I can’t. So little to do, you understand.” He doesn’t correct himself this time, so he must be utterly flustered.

He won’t go now. Charlie knows that determined furrowing of Wonka’s brow all too well. He’s adaptive, he’s flexible, but he isn’t infallible, and he can be _obstinate._ Folding the scarf in fourths, Charlie lays it atop Wonka’s desk. “I understand,” he murmurs. “Next time.”

“Another time,” Wonka says, which sounds less promising than _next._

“I understand,” Charlie repeats, even if he determinedly doesn’t, but he isn’t about to beg for Wonka’s unwilling company, either. He turns to go.

Wonka speaks very softly, but Charlie hears him nevertheless. “I was afraid you would.”

Oh, no. Charlie isn’t going to play a game without any rules, even for Wonka’s sake. “Don’t you dare,” he says, whirling back around. Wonka’s eyes widen a bit, but then narrow just slightly, shading toward chilled. “That isn’t fair,” Charlie insists. “Don’t you dare do this to me!” This isn’t a game, not really, and Charlie leans sharply forward over Wonka’s desk, slamming both hands flat against the wood. Not a violent gesture, but a firm one.

Wonka’s jaw tightens, the lines of tension around his mouth that Charlie has seen only rarely in the last several years coming into play. He has that unpleasant expression of mixed disappointment and condescension, and something childish in Charlie’s heart quails, but he isn’t about to surrender. Not this time. “Don’t shout at me.”

“Don’t shout at you in your own office?” Wonka said that to him once, when Charlie was sixteen and furious about something inconsequential. Charlie rarely shouts, and he isn’t shouting now, just gritting his teeth and speaking through them. “Our office,” he corrects. “It’s our office, and this is _us,_ and if you’re going to hide from me, you’d better find a better place to do it.” He turns on his heel and makes for the door. “I’m going. Do what you like. Do what you do best. Play make-believe.” He doesn’t slam the door--no matter how satisfying that would be, but he isn’t a child anymore--just lets it click quietly shut behind him, and leaves Wonka alone.

He hates fighting with Wonka. It makes him feel shattered inside, hollow at the heart. Hypocritical, like he’s rejecting some essential part of himself.

The truth is that he loves playing make-believe with Willy Wonka...so long as he’s actually part of the game.

Outside, the snow is still falling, spiraling around Charlie when he stands in the center of the courtyard, arms slightly outstretched and face tipped upward to the sky. Maybe he’s kneeling in supplication; he doesn’t know. The breeze spins the snowflakes into curls like question marks.

He can’t beckon him forward with one hand and push him back with the other. Can he?

Of course he can. He’s Willy Wonka, and he’s a study in unexpected contradictions. Wonderful and whimsical and frightening and frustrating, all things at once.

Charlie knows that he reached him at least once, touched something far deeper than the surface with that kiss, but reaching into Wonka a second time will be more difficult without the advantage of surprise. He’s too clever to underestimate Charlie again. Charlie curves his lips a bit, working at the problem in all the ways he’s ever learned, and one lesson he recalls particularly well is that if a solution can’t be found going forwards, it might be found going backwards. Wonka’s ideas move like unexpected reflections, bouncing and doubling back, but using his own tactics against him isn’t so difficult nevertheless.

In other words...even if he can’t sink below Wonka’s self defenses, he might still outmaneuver him by rising above them.

Exceeding expectations, as it were.

Christmas is fast approaching, only a week away, and with it could come the opportunity for something spectacular. Wonka has always been highly complicated, so far as presents are concerned. Charlie gave up on store-bought gifts years ago, in fact, after fiascos with ties and paintings and one ill-advised chartreuse sweater. Recently, he’s taken to giving usefully aesthetic things, or a little more rarely, ideas. Wonka appreciates nothing else so much as creativity.

He has no ideas at the moment that Wonka doesn’t already know about. Unless...

Charlie raises his hands up in front of his face, snowflakes clinging to his gloves. Each one sparkles with a unique sort of magic, so purely individual. Wonka looks incredible in the snow, all dark angles contrasting fluffy white.

As an idea goes, it’s complex, but certainly workable, and Charlie feels the first shivers of obsessive excitement in his chest, fluttering behind his ribs. In that way, he and Wonka are always the same, because a wonderful idea demands total concentration and complete commitment. If he starts working now, he can surely finish by Christmas, perhaps even by Christmas Eve, and he can give Wonka something extraordinary. Something to remind him that Charlie really does know him best, after all, and that the end of innocence doesn’t necessarily mean the end of magic.

By the time he goes back into the factory, Wonka has already commandeered the Inventing Room, but Charlie knows better than to set this project up anywhere that Wonka might see it--sometimes the man is a little too clever for his own good. The Oompa-Loompas will help him too, because they love surprises. They usually aid Charlie in his Christmas endeavors, and this time they agree so readily when he approaches them that he suspects they’ve all been lying in wait until he found a proper idea.

He and Wonka make a very tentative peace over dinner that night, all too-polite apologies and forced cheerfulness. Charlie escapes as soon as possible, and throws himself into his work.

By the night before Christmas Eve, he isn’t sleeping at all, hanging from the rafters of the Chocolate Room instead and installing strange squiggly lines of piping and heavy vats of coolant. Building a dream requires a certain amount of perfectionism, after all, and this gift requires a lot of scientific testing. He has to see it in action, first, to satisfy the question of whether or not he’s still capable of manufacturing magic.

Once the test goes off perfectly, he falls into bed and sleeps dreamlessly for the first time in days.

Charlie wakes up some time past noon, but Wonka knows he’s been working on something, and will understand why he missed two meals in a row. After a shower and a hasty cup of coffee, he finds Wonka in the Chocolate Room of course, decorating that most beautiful part of the factory with the help of possibly half the Oompa-Loompas on staff.

Every year, Wonka guides the Oompa-Loompas in the construction of the Christmas tree, a ridiculously tall and gorgeously extravagant creation of peppermint bark fringed with long needles of evergreen swudge. It tastes of mint and smells like pine. When Charlie was still eleven or twelve, he liked to hide beneath it, lying back and plucking off individual needles to lick, watching each one grow thinner and thinner until the last glassy bit melted against his tongue. Nothing compares to that sort of decadence. They always decorate the tree with real candy canes and gingerbread people and round ornaments molded from white and dark chocolate. The Oompa-Loompas love painting all their molded swirls and holly leaves with bright dyes.

“No no no no no!” Wonka is fretting, dancing from foot to foot as he waves both hands at the Oompa-Loompas thirty feet up, holding the star above the tree in a way that is certainly less than centered. “It must be straight! No, not that side! Not that side either!”

Charlie comes to the rescue, since the Oompa-Loompas are now helplessly spinning about in circles. “To the left! No, the right--just a little--like that.” The star settles onto the tree both centered and straight, with the right side thankfully facing outward, and the Oompa-Loompas descend gratefully from their grapping hooks and climbing ropes.

Wonka turns and latches onto him immediately, too excited to remember that they’ve been silently fighting over the past week, and Charlie surprises himself by willingly forgetting about that as well. This is familiar tradition, and falling back into their usual patterns of affection proves simple enough. Wonka is all warmth and light like this, with just that hint of underlying mystery to counterbalance it, and his enthusiasm is real instead of forced. While they’re decorating the tree, Charlie even wraps an arm naturally around Wonka’s waist, and the moment is intimate and sweet rather than tense or frustrating. Everything feels easy, and once evening falls, his confidence in the success of his gift rises.

Once the hour rolls around to half past nine, the Oompa-Loompas have brought out the butterscotch and buttergin, and Wonka is offering Charlie half a glass of bubbling champagne. He’s well over eighteen now, so he takes it willingly and sips it slowly, letting it steel his resolve. Wonka looks very good drinking out of a long-stemmed glass, rather Victorian, and Charlie decides that now is the time. He rises from his place beside the tree, then steps over to stand in front of Wonka and clear his throat.

“There’s something...” he begins, trailing off as the sound of drums begins, the Oompa-Loompas gathering around. In another moment, they start to sing to Wonka:

_“He has something for you!  
A gift! A gift!  
It’s really swift!  
You’ll never believe what our Charlie can make!  
You’ll never imagine just how he can take  
An idea that some would say isn’t so great--”_

“All right all right,” Charlie cuts in, daring to interrupt their singing for once, since--as usual--the lyrics don’t seem to be going in his favor. “That’s quite enough of that, I think, or you’ll spoil it.” He makes a shooing motion with one hand, and the Oompa-Loompas scatter to their assigned places, giggling and hardly looking contrite.

Charlie puts his hands together, meeting Wonka’s eyes with an arcane smile. He makes a flourish, snapping up the crystals he has tucked into his sleeves, one in each hand, and then he starts gliding them back and forth, over his fingers and wrists and lower arms, switching them from hand to hand. “This is going to be my best magic trick,” he says, and both Wonka’s eyebrows arch in curiosity, but he doesn’t say anything. “So you know what you have to do.” He grins, just a bit, rolling the crystals back and forth in a hypnotic pattern. “You have to close your eyes.”

Wonka gives him just a breath of laughter, but does it. His eyelashes flutter dark against his pale skin.

Charlie nods to the Oompa-Loompas, and they spring into action. Nothing so difficult to do, after all. He waits a full thirty seconds, counting silently, and then draws in his breath, holding it for a moment. “All right,” he says. “You can open them now.” He slides the twin crystals down his forearms and over his wrists, catching one in either hand, as Wonka opens eyes of purest violet blue. “Abracadabra,” he breathes.

Snow is falling from the ceiling of the Chocolate Room, sparkling in the lights of their Christmas tree. It eddies around the licorice twists of the other trees, flurries about the Oompa-Loompas who stand with faces upturned, and clings to their clothes and skin. Bits of starlight ice gleam in Wonka’s dark hair. One snowflake falls exactly onto Wonka’s nose, and Charlie wants to cup his face in both hands and lick it away with the tip of his tongue.

He smiles instead. “You wouldn’t come out. So I turned the outside inside-out, and brought it in here, for you.”

Only very, very rarely is Wonka rendered speechless. It doesn’t last long, but it’s more than enough, nevertheless.

“Oh,” Wonka breathes, _“oh._ Wow.”

He makes a slow and complete turn on his heels, spinning under the cascade of snowflakes--manufactured, yes, but still real and solid and pure. He holds up both gloved hands to it, like Charlie himself did, outside six days ago, and then he laughs, a sound like music, full of complete delight. Charlie’s heartbeat flutters, knowing that he’s undoubtedly done _right_ by this man, yet again.

He’s done right by the factory, as well. The snow is nothing but sugar water, mixed with the compound that keeps Wonka’s best brands of ice cream from melting, and showered down in a precise formation to keep from contaminating the chocolate river. All necessary but secondary concerns.

Under the snow, the Oompa-Loompas are dancing now, singing a sweetly celebratory song in their own language and throwing the occasional tiny snowball. Wonka catches one snowflake on the tip of his tongue and blinks, startled. “It’s real,” he says. “And it tastes like vanilla.”

“Of course it’s real,” Charlie scolds with a helpless grin. He thinks he can indulge in a little deserved pride this evening. “The vanilla is my addition, though.”

Wonka tilts his face up, closing his eyes for a long minute, with hands outspread. “We can make this,” he says, and Charlie grins a little wider. Wonka is still a businessman above all else, a creator, and he loves to distribute his particular brand of enchantment to a needy world. A philanthropist, too, but money is necessary for the maintenance of the Oompa-Loompas and this fantasy home. “We can market this, and even children in Siberia can have a white Christmas--I mean, even children in the Sahara--you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.” Charlie can’t stop smiling, so he just links Wonka’s arm with his own and leads him down the slope to the chocolate river, walking with him until the music of the Oompa-Loompas isn’t so loud, and they can hear each other speak. When Wonka pauses, raising one hand to the snowfall again, Charlie halts as well and turns to face him. The room is dim, lit mostly by the lights wound around the Christmas tree, the overhead lamps turned low.

“I wanted to give you something magic,” Charlie says. His voice is pitched low, naturally so, for this moment of intimacy.

“You did,” Wonka murmurs, his own voice quiet. “Oh. You did.” As always, he means more than he ever says, and Charlie moves just a step closer, watching his eyes, trying to see into him.

Wonka’s eyes shine faintly in the dark. _Gaslight,_ Charlie thinks, uneasy for a moment, remembering stories of will ’o wisps in the fog, tempting travelers, follow and fall.

Then Wonka surges forward, slender arms reaching, body all angled beauty. Both those arms go suddenly around his waist, drawing him close, and despite gasping a breath, Charlie holds him in reflex--no, in instinct, one arm against Wonka’s waist, the other tangled over his shoulder blades, fingers at the nape of his neck. He’s three inches taller than Wonka, and he’s known that for two years, but now the abstract fact is a physical reality of warmth and weight, limbs fitting together. Puzzle pieces too strange and jagged for any other proper match.

They’ve clicked together, matched in all the important places. This time it’s easy. Charlie angles his head, and their lips brush together, then cling. The kiss is chaste at first, dry but warm and softer than before, willing and slow.

But something has changed between them, opened, and Charlie splays both hands against Wonka’s back, pressing in and running his tongue along Wonka’s lower lip. It’s a natural movement, a soft drift into intimacy, and after only a heartbeat the lips against his part fully, letting him truly inside for the first time.

Wonka tastes of champagne and sugar snow.

Charlie would sacrifice a great deal of himself to ensure that this sensation never ends, Willy Wonka pressed velvet and warm against him, lips parted and soft, tongue brushing smooth against his own. He’s no poet, no artist at all, but this is the sort of inspiration that requires no traditional artistic representation.

He pulls back first, with painful reluctance, but he’s learned not to apply too much pressure. His hands stay gentle against Wonka’s back, their breath mingling against each other’s lips. Wonka shocks him, leaning in again on his own initiative, eyes narrowed to glimmering slits. They kiss again, truly sharing breath, and Wonka’s tongue slides like rough velvet into Charlie’s mouth. It’s the gentlest form of possession Charlie can imagine.

When they part again, he can feel the subtle tremors of Wonka’s body under his fingers, against his chest.

“I was starting to think...” Charlie swallows and tries again, as they inch apart, just enough to give each other room to breathe. “I thought you just didn’t want me.”

Lips quirking, Wonka chuckles, a strangely nervous sound, and rests his fingertips against his lips. “I’m not that unselfish.”

“Good,” Charlie says, and the sound he makes isn’t quite a laugh. It catches in his throat.

At the opposite edge of the Chocolate Room, the Oompa-Loompas are still singing, apparently paying no attention to them whatsoever, but Charlie thinks he catches sly glances from them now and then. He harbors no illusions that they don’t have every idea just what has been going on, and that makes him want privacy like nothing else.

“Let’s go somewhere,” he murmurs. “Somewhere else.”

For a moment, he catches that flash of wary fear in Wonka’s eyes again, but it disappears, and Wonka doesn’t object when Charlie takes his hands, bare fingers against dark gloves. Charlie leads them away from the river and to the door, subtly and silently, but once they’ve passed through that door and it shuts behind them, a sort of collective whoop comes from inside the Chocolate Room, ending in a smattering of applause from tiny and undeniably meddling hands.

Charlie winces, embarrassed more for Wonka’s sake than his own, but Wonka gives him a rueful smile and tugs at the hands in his. “Come,” he says. “This place keeps its own secrets well enough, doesn’t it?”

It does. Charlie nods and for the moment, follows his lead.

They end up in front of the door to Wonka’s private rooms, hesitating before crossing over that threshold. Charlie takes a moment and realizes that they shouldn’t pause; they should let this momentum carry them as far as it possibly can. Better that neither of them have time to remember that Wonka is afraid, or that Charlie should be apprehensive. Strange that he doesn’t feel hopelessly virginal at the moment. Perhaps that’s due to Wonka’s usual effect upon him, making him better and braver than he otherwise might be.

Wonka fishes in his pockets for a moment, searching a little too frantically, and Charlie puts a hand over his and reaches into the topmost inner pocket of the familiar jacket, fetching the key ring. He does know Wonka better than most.

Wonka unlocks the door, then catches Charlie’s hand and pulls him into the darkness beyond it.

They fumble against each other for a second or two before Wonka finds the light switch and flips it. This is the study, books upon books and velvet-upholstered chairs in front of the fireplace. Sedate and charming. Wonka clears his throat. “Can I...would you like something to drink?”

The usual method of slow seduction seems unnecessary. Charlie steps forward, hands framing Wonka’s face, fingertips resting against his high cheekbones. His voice doesn’t sound like his own. “No. Just you.”

For a moment, Wonka’s throat works as he swallows; then he reaches back, and turns the lock. Charlie thinks that simple movement, in all its mundane glory, might be the most arousing thing he’s ever seen. The layers of meaning blur together, warm and hazy in the lamplight, and Wonka tilts his head slightly, turning toward Charlie’s hands. They kiss again, then again, deep and wet.

Charlie knows the way to the bedroom. He’s been there twice, both times when he was much younger, and still sometimes troubled by nightmares. When he came knocking at odd hours of the morning, Wonka would bundle him up in a spare quilt and share the bed with him, even though Charlie was really too old to need to sleep with anyone else. This time he’s more than old enough to sleep with someone else, in the very figurative sense of the phrase, and the thought makes his heartbeat skip. He remembers the faint clinging of Wonka’s scent, from those two nights, and it hasn’t changed in all these years.

This time, he doesn’t hesitate to take the first step, and Wonka follows willingly down the short hall and into the bedroom. Charlie closes the door behind them, and Wonka turns the lights on low.

In the shadows, Charlie can’t see his eyes, hidden by the brim of his hat, and he breathes a silent sigh of relief when Wonka takes the hat off and sets it on a chair. Another breath and he’s shrugging out of the jacket, so Charlie steps forward and helps him, letting his hands linger against Wonka’s shoulders, then against his waist, fingers fitting perfectly against narrow curves. The jacket goes the way of the hat, discarded. Charlie isn’t prepared when Wonka spins to face him, rising up on his toes for another kiss. One melts into another, tasting of sugared vanilla, and Charlie is only dimly aware of Wonka removing those ever-present gloves, setting bare fingers to work along the fastenings of Charlie’s outer jacket. The clasps might make anyone else fumble, but Wonka triumphs over them all with delicate ease and lets the garment slide to the floor.

They pause then, watching each other, Wonka’s hands splayed against his chest, their heat reaching Charlie’s skin through his shirt. Charlie thinks about saying that they needn’t go so far, that it isn’t necessary, but Wonka is already unfastening his shirt, button by button, and the sight is too beautiful to resist.

Perhaps Wonka knows what’s on his mind, anyway. As he slips Charlie’s shirt off each arm, their eyes meet again, searchingly, and then Wonka gives him the slightest curve of a smile, lips parted. The expression is perfection. It’s part demure adult, part innocent sensualist, and it leaves no doubt whatsoever in Charlie’s mind that Wonka knows exactly what he’s doing. His hands glide over Charlie’s chest, fingertips and palms stroking, as if smoothing fine fabric. In a moment he’s urging Charlie back a step, up against the closed door, his hands dragging downward and ghosting over Charlie’s sides and abdomen, then--God--unzipping his pants, delving inside to gently cup, then knead.

Charlie groans, biting into his lower lip. He won’t tear his eyes away from Wonka, whose smile has shifted subtly, wild and fey and brilliant, those eyes sparkling beneath long lashes. Wonka glides his fingers deeper, pulling Charlie’s underwear aside, then wraps slender fingers around him and strokes, gentle and erratic, and Charlie’s breathing goes uneven, following that pattern. He’s never been touched by any hands but his own. The experience is almost revelatory, the man giving it to him no less extraordinary, and he lets his head fall back against the steady weight of the door, needing the support, because now Wonka is kneeling in front of him, holding him steady, and replacing his fingertips with his tongue.

“Oh my...oh...my...”

He can’t finish the thought. Strange sentiment, but he’s always loved Wonka’s tongue--those glimpses of soft pink when he’s tasting something, when he’s licking his lips. Enticing.

Or maybe it’s Wonka’s entire mouth he loves, because that mouth is wrapping around him now, drawing him in and drawing him deep.

His universe condenses into one slow, molten glide, pressure and friction and the gentlest rasp of teeth to contrast wet heat. Then Wonka presses with his tongue, velvet warm and _rubbing_ and Charlie’s legs just aren’t going to hold him up any longer. Knees buckling, he slides down to kneel on the floor, and Wonka follows him, hands curving wiry around Charlie’s hips and mouth never faltering.

Charlie sobs out a breath and winds both hands into Wonka’s hair, back arching. He rarely has the opportunity to so personally experience the thoroughness inherent in this man’s nature.

In this moment, resistance is the only impossible thing.

He sobs again, fingers stroking restlessly at the nape of Wonka’s neck, eyes half-closed and blurring the image of Wonka wrapped against him, pulling him deep into his mouth. Then he cries out, eyes clenching shut as he comes apart for the first time into someone else, oh God, into _Wonka,_ and he gives up everything he can this way, hips shuddering with ecstasy.

By the time the pressure eases, and Wonka pulls back from him, Charlie is loose and panting against the door, still feeling stretched apart at the seams. Then Wonka is licking his lips. God, licking _him_ off his lips, then licking his bare fingertips, and the sight is enough to make Charlie groan, gathering himself to rise up and catch hold of Wonka’s hand, licking those fingertips himself, slow glides of his tongue. Quivering, Wonka closes his eyes. Too much clothing is still between them, and Charlie angles forward onto his hands and knees, kicking off his pants and his shoes and catching Wonka’s elbows with both hands, dragging them both up to their feet with a little graceless and shaken stumbling. Confidence hangs around Charlie, heavy and warm, the gift that Wonka has given him, and he puts it to good use in urging the man over to the bed and pulling them both onto it, side by side. Wonka won’t quite meet his eyes, but the flush of his cheeks is encouragement enough.

Eager, Charlie stretches out against him, fingers working at the buttons of Wonka’s shirt, laying the fabric completely open before urging him up enough to strip the garment from one arm, then the other. Trousers next, unfastening the zipper hidden behind a row of faux buttons. He drags the material down Wonka’s hips and smooths it off each slender calf, and then Wonka is almost entirely bare beside him, just underwear distorting the pure lines of raw form.

The room is dim and the skin against his glows faintly in the lamplight. His lips flutter over Wonka’s collarbones, one hand smoothing down his chest, fingers trembling a bit because Wonka feels rich and silken, as if he spends every morning bathing in cream. His skin might taste sweet. Charlie has to know. Leaning closer, he swirls a spiral over Wonka’s breastbone with his tongue, trailing lower to lap gently at one nipple, enchanted with the tightening of the skin under his mouth. Charlie suckles at the other, shaping it with his tongue and listening to Wonka’s breathing quicken in response when he glides down over his chest, tonguing the hollows of his ribs. Wonka pants in soft gasps when Charlie licks over his abdomen, head turning restlessly against the sheets when Charlie strips away his last bit of clothing and begins touching him for the first time. Charlie curls his fingers around steeled flesh, beautifully unfamiliar to his hands.

He’s just decided that tasting might well be preferable to only touching, when Wonka draws in a shuddering breath and lifts himself up onto his elbows, displacing Charlie’s hands. For a moment, Charlie is reeling, losing equilibrium without his fingers focused on Wonka’s skin.

Fortunately, Wonka is only turning to search through the drawer of his bedside table. When he turns back, he’s holding a tall bottle in one hand, and he offers it carefully to Charlie, their eyes meeting and holding for a moment. Charlie glances at the bottle, tilting his head to read the label. It’s lotion, and comprehension jerks through him in a deep tug of returning arousal. Wonka’s fingers are trembling, ever so slightly, and Charlie meets his gaze again as his two hands close around Wonka’s one, holding secure for a second or two before taking the bottle and everything it represents.

He won’t do anything stupid, like asking if Wonka is sure. He’ll just do his absolute and utter best, and Wonka won’t insult him by asking if he knows what he’s doing. Those are the conditions of their old relationship, teacher to student, but now they imply a new level of respect--the sort given between adults.

Charlie slicks his fingers, and the smell of something like toasting marshmallows and roasted almonds fills the room, comforting.

Given his own particularly thorough research on this subject, Charlie knows the mechanics of it well enough, but no one could prepare for the reality of slow preparation, the movement of skin and the quickness of breath, the way heated flesh grips the first thrusts of his fingertips, and the way Wonka moans and arches his hips up off the mattress when he pushes his fingers deep and high and rotates them in an exploratory caress.

Then Wonka reaches up and grips him, stroking his renewed arousal to full hardness in a few gentle tugs, and together they ease into position, settling Charlie between Wonka’s spread thighs. Face to face, cheek to cheek, Charlie eases inside with slowly stretching thrusts, crying out against the juncture of Wonka’s shoulder and neck as he comes to rest fully buried in Wonka’s body, held deep and close and tight by surreptitious ripples of living heat.

He can’t contain this, and he’s on the edge of some ecstasy more brilliant than any physical facsimile. It’s everything he’s wanted, and he thinks it’s everything he’ll ever really want, coiled into one single moment of unabashed giving.

One pure moment of receiving, too. But Wonka’s gone stiff and quivering beneath him, eyes closed, face turned to one side.

Charlie wonders just when the other man went from participant to observer, from enjoying to enduring, and why he ever felt the need to teach himself that particular defensive skill.

“You can’t go back that way,” Charlie breathes, his fingers buried in Wonka’s hair, spilling strands over the pillows. “You have to go forward to go back.” He drapes himself over Wonka’s chest, speaking against the arch of his throat, words trembling against skin. “Let me,” he says, eyelashes tickling against the angle of Wonka’s jaw. “Please let me _give.”_

He doesn’t entirely understand what so terrifies Wonka; his heart doesn’t work quite that way. But he does have trust enough for the two of them, and he’s giving it with eyes open to all the flaws and imperfections that balance the wonder and enchantment of Wonka’s full nature.

Wonka is silent, shaking, but then his hands unclench against Charlie’s shoulders, as if releasing something at last. He’s shaking still, small nervous tremors, and Charlie wraps over him, strangely protective, heart rising into his throat until Wonka begins to truly relax, fingers smoothing through Charlie’s hair, body stilling. In a minute more, he turns his head, meeting Charlie’s gaze; his cheeks are flushed, his hair tangled around his face, his eyes all dark pupils rimmed by rings of heated blue.

Charlie keeps his eyes locked with Wonka’s and moves slow. Intense, aching thrusts, starting gradually, quickening into pulsing rhythm, into long minutes of drawn out friction. Then Charlie sweeps both arms under Wonka’s knees, positioning and angling each thrust, and beneath him, Wonka begins to make the most delicious keening sounds in his throat, head flung back, utterly vulnerable, his fingernails clenching into Charlie’s back. Even the pain is pleasant.

“I love you,” Charlie breathes against the beautiful curve of Wonka’s neck. “Oh my God. I love you.”

He thrusts again, just once more, angled with those words, and Willy Wonka jerks against him and cries out, body shuddering as he spills wet heat between them, like lifeblood.

Charlie holds to the rhythm, his own body rippling with fine tremors of restraint, hands smoothing strands of hair back from Wonka’s face. God, but he can feel the man shuddering around him, clenching again and again, holding him as close as physical form allows. Then Wonka lifts languid hands, fingers lacing at the nape of Charlie’s neck, legs tightening around him again with a subtle push. He takes the invitation to heart, thrusts quickening. Wonka wraps around him, rocking with him, meeting and holding his gaze with shattering intensity and driving him into ecstasy and beyond it, into a shuddering brilliance of perfect bliss.

When he comes back to himself, he’s still cradled in Wonka’s arms, embraced instead of clinging, and Willy Wonka’s hands are stroking through his hair, over his back, and occasionally over the angle of his hip.

Charlie draws in a shuddering breath, forcing himself up onto his forearms to look into Wonka’s eyes. They have a hazy cast, like dreaming skies.

“I thought you would want to be rid of me by now,” Wonka says, very soft. Confession. “Not here, not this,” he amends, indicating the way they’ve curled together, “just that you would want the factory to yourself by now. Preposterous of me to linger about, getting in your way, when you have your life ahead of you--”

“No.” For a moment, Charlie dips his head, his forehead resting against Wonka’s in silent connection. “Never. Never go.”

He feels the trembling rush of Wonka’s breath against his throat.

“What would I do without you?” Charlie says, lifting a hand to run one fingertip up the length of Wonka’s throat and higher, lingering against the curve of his lower lip.

Wonka closes his eyes, tongue flicking, lingering against Charlie’s skin. “There’s no question of what I would do without you,” Wonka says. “I wouldn’t.”

Charlie arches an eyebrow, not immediately catching the meaning. “You wouldn’t what?”

“I wouldn’t _do.”_

It isn’t an intricate and flowery confession of love, but it still makes Charlie struggle to breathe. He isn’t only an optimist, and the practical side of his nature knows just how many more troubles they might still face in the morning...but they will face them that morning, and every morning after that, because Charlie’s luck really is the best, and he has no intention of ever wasting it. Forget sugar snow. Forever with Willy Wonka will be the best magic he’ll ever make, after all.

~End~


End file.
